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"Bettina Mathes (ed.), Die imaginierte Nation: Identität, Körper und Geschlecht in DEFA- Filmen (Berlin 2007)" is a collection of essays exploring the interplay between gender, nation and socialism in DEFA-films (East German studio films).
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Verschleierte Wirklichkeit. Die Frau, der Islam und der Westen by Bettina Mathes and Christina von Braun. Aufbau Verlag 2007, hardcover 480 pages |
“Verschleierte Wirklichkeit” is a cultural history of the “enigmatic” Western subject seen through the lens of its views on Islam and the “orient”. The book analyzes the manifold historical, cultural, scientific, economic, sexual and gendered exchanges between ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’. While our starting point is the current “headscarf debate” in several European countries, we argue that for the West the veil both symbolically and metaphorically has functioned as a privileged signifier to construct the ‘Orient’ as a space of secrecy, mystery, and backwardness as well as to cloak the vested interests of the western subject that posits itself as neutral, objective, and masculine.
“Verschleierte Wirklichkeit” interprets Western fantasies about the “Orient” and about Islam as symptoms of the Western unconscious. Rather than painting an accurate picture of muslim culture these fantasies express hidden fears and unspeakable anxieties that pertain to Western culture. Stereotypical views of muslim cultures are an attempt to displace otherness and difference within our own culture. In this process of ‘othering’, historical constructions of femininity and masculinity have played an important role.
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Under Cover, |
In what ways do media act as “ambassadors” or “secret agents” of the gender system? What kinds of relations exist between surfaces produced by media and the materiality of the gendered body? UNDER COVER is an examination of the bodily origins of different reproductive media, such as alphabet, linear perspective, photography, the internet, and the ways this ‘forgotten’ body of the signifier structures (early) modern perceptions of the gendered body. Reproductive media are the sex organs of our culture. UNDER COVER explores how notions of fertility, sexuality and gender tied to the genitalia “migrate” into media und from there generate new ideas about the ‘nature’ of the body. We can understand the influence that media have on our ideas about the body and its ability to reproduce all the better if we know of the largely forgotten bodily origins of these media. A culture may be able to develop techniques that allow it to forget this history and these bodies, but history forgets neither the culture nor the body.
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The Flying Head and Other Poems, |
Viktor Neborak is one of the leading Ukrainian poets writing today, and his book of poetry The Flying Head (1990) has become a living classic in its time. A dazzling poet from the Bu-Ba-Bu literary performance group, Neborak captures the rock, reggae, rap, and other rhythms of his time to boldly explore the aesthetics of freedom. The Flying Head comprises an inventive journey into the physical and metaphysical worlds of the poet from the years just prior to the crumbling of the Soviet empire. This bilingual edition translated by Michael Naydan and published by Silver Word Publishers has been given special recognition and the Order of the Ravlyk Award at the Lviv Publishers Forum in 2005 and was named the Book of the Year for 2005 in the category of poetry at the Kyiv Publishers Forum in March 2006. For an article by Michael Naydan on the Ukrainian avant-garde go to the following website, which also includes sample translations of Neborak as well as other Ukrainian writers: <http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/onlinemagazine/2005septdecember/08-WLTSept-05-Naydan.pdf>.
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Im Spiegel der Schmetterlinge, |
Liliana Ursu (b.1949) is one of Romania’s best known contemporary poets. She produces and hosts a weekly literary program for Romanian National Radio and has published nine books of poetry as well as short stories, essays and translations. In 1992-93 and again in 1997-98 she was a Fulbright Scholar at Penn State’s Department of Slavic and East European Languages. English translations of her work have appeared in the New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, and in four editions of her poetry published in Great Britain and the US. The present volume is the first German edition of her work. It contains ca. fifty poems from the past thirty years in Romanian and German, selected, translated and introduced by Adrian Wanner. The poems are arranged geographically, forming a symbolic voyage from Sibiu (Hermannstadt), Ursu’s birthplace in Transylvania, to the Carpathian Mountains, the Romanian capital Bucharest, and from the Black Sea coast all the way to America. At the same time, the journey leads from the realm of material existence to a state of spiritual transcendence.
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Perverzion , by Yuri Andrukhovych, |
A work of sly, subversive humor and fantastic wordplay, Perverzion is a look into Ukraine 's post-Soviet literary culture by one of the country's foremost contemporary writers. Yuri Andrukhovych, a former Fulbright Scholar at Penn State , was born in 1960 in Ivano-Frankivsk , Ukraine . He is the author of several novels, numerous short stories and three volumes of poetry. Perverzion reconstructs Perfetsky's final days using a mishmash of relics, from official documents to recorded interviews to scraps of paper. Perfetsky, the personification of the Ukrainian artistic superman (for example, he plays countless musical instruments so well he collaborated with Elton John during the star's secret sojourn in Ukraine), is bound for Venice to participate in a seminar to save the world from its absurdity. On the way he becomes a Ukrainian Orpheus, descending into the sophisticated decadence of the West, navigating through surrealistic adventures and no less surrealistic seminar topics as he charges head up (and pants down) toward his fate.
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A Companion to the Works of Hartman van Aue |
In the course of perhaps twenty-five years of creative productivity (ca. 1180-ca. 1205), Hartmann von Aue authored a dispute about love between the body and the heart, Die Klage (ca. 1180 85), numerous songs of courtly love, crusading songs, and most likely took part in a Crusade himself. He composed the first German Arthurian romance, Erec (ca. 1185 90), based on Chrétien’s like-named work and he—apparently—ended his literary career with a second, Iwein (completed ca. 1205). Further, he is the creator of two provocative religious didactic works, Gregorius (ca. 1190-97), a tale of double incest, repentance, and redemption, and the Arme Heinrich (also composed ca. 1190 97, but after Gregorius), the account of a seemingly perfect nobleman who is stricken with leprosy and who is ultimately cured by a process set into motion by a very young peasant girl, whom he ultimately marries. No other medieval German poet evidences this extraordinary breadth of themes with the artistry of expression. The essays in this volume, written by scholars from North America and Europe, offer the interested reader an insight into many aspects of Hartmann’s oeuvre including threes essays devoted to the medieval and modern visual and literary reception of his works. The volume also offers considerations of Hartmann and Chrétien; Hartmann’s putative theological background and the influence of the Bible on his tales; the reflection of his medical knowledge in the Arme Heinrich and Iwein; and a complete survey of his lyric production. Newer avenues of research are also presented with essays on issues of gender and an analysis of the role of pain as a constitutive part of the courtly experience. It is hoped that this volume will prove to be a stimulating companion not only for those quite familiar with Hartmann but also for those who are just making the acquaintance of one of the greatest of medieval German poets.
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The Rise of Fashion |
In The Rise of Fashion, Daniel Purdy brings together key writings from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century that explore fashion as the ultimate expression of modernity. Making available many previously untranslated or otherwise unfamiliar works from French, German, and English, Purdy establishes an extraordinary lineage of fashion commentary dating back to Mandeville and Voltaire, which laid the groundwork for the writings on commodity culture of Adorno, Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School. From critiques of aristocratic excess to accounts of fashion's influence on our ideals of masculinity or femininity, from the figure of the dandy and the eroticism of clothing to the class politics of fashion, this landmark reader includes works by philosophers (Carlyle, Rousseau, Georg Simmel) and social theorists (Herbert Spencer, Veblen), as well as writers (Goethe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Wilde) and critics (Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Simone de Beauvoir). Collecting and contextualizing many of the earliest and most significant formulations of fashion theory, The Rise of Fashion provocatively examines the proposition that to be modern is to be fashionable.
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Miniaturwelten: Russische Prosagedichte von Turgenjew bis Charms |
This bilingual Russian-German anthology, the first of its kind, contains ca. one hundred prose poems by seventeen Russian authors, selected, translated, introduced and annotated by Adrian Wanner. The individual texts are characterized by lyric intensity, eccentric humor, or provocative simplicity. They take the reader on a voyage of discovery through a largely uncharted territory of Russian literary history.
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A Land the Size of Binoculars |
One of the brightest lights on the post perestroika literary scene, Igor Klekh is influenced by the great Russian literary tradition as well as the languages of Eastern and Central Europe and his native western Ukraine. His breathtakingly original work has been welcomed as a fresh synthesis of multiple literary traditions, drawing comparisons with Jorge Luis Borges's for the blurring of boundaries between forms and styles; Nikolai Gogol's focus on the ontology of the world; Umberto Eco's use of esoteric knowledge; and the stylistic innovations reminiscent of Latin American magic realists. An excellent introduction to one of the best stylists in contemporary Russian prose, A Land the Size of Binoculars collects most of Kelkh's major fictional work to date, including three novellas and five short pieces.
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Die Domänen des Emblems: Außerliterarische Anwendungen der Emblematik |
Gerhard F. Straßer, together with Prof. Mara R. Wade, Univ. of Illinois, co-edited this volume. The collection of essays--resulting from an invited symposium the two editors had organized at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany--focuses on the use of 16th- and 17th-century emblems in such non-literary areas as painted wall tiles; emblematic programs used to decorate public areas like the large assembly room ("Goldener Saal") in the Gothic Nuremberg city hall (destroyed in WWII); emblematic references in two portraits by Hans Holbein; Luther's theological view of imagery in reference to emblematics; visual elements in the music of the Early Modern Period; emblems and court entertainments; pedagogy and emblems, and emblematic paintings on country furniture in 18th-century Friesland (the book cover reproduces one of these paintings). The volume closes with the expanded symposium keynote address by Prof. Karl Josef Höltgen, OBE, on emblematic title pages in Britain and their cultural context, a chapter that stresses once more the overarching concern of this volume, namely the positioning of emblems within the larger framework of the culture of the Early Modern Period.
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Trial by Fire and Battle in Medieval German Literature |
Medieval judicial ordeals, especially trial by fire or battle, conjure up vivid pictures in the modern imagination. Searing iron and clashing swords shape popular perceptions of the Middle Ages, yet leave the reader without a context in which to understand this most dramatic and most drastic of medieval judicial remedies. This book brings together literary texts that provide some of the most vivid and detailed accounts of the medieval ordeal. It analyzes the late medieval Charlemagne epics, Gottfried's Tristan, and Stricker's short secular burlesque "The Hot Iron," written in the mid 13th century. The study brings extensive background material in legal and cultural history to bear on literary texts, enabling both medievalists and general readers to reach a broader and more informed understanding of the function of the ordeal and related legal issues in the texts as well as in the larger society for whom these works were written.
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Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story |
Challenging traditional concepts of poetry and narrative prose, the prose poem is by nature a "subversive" form--and as such has drawn extensive interest in literature and criticism during the past two decades. Russian Minimalism is the first book to apply the theoretical debate on the nature of the prose poem to the history of Russian literature. The notion of minimalism, borrowed from the realm of American visual arts, is used as a critical tool for a historical investigation of the genesis and development of the Russian prose miniature. The book covers a variety of works of Russian literature, ranging from Ivan Turgenev's "Poems in Prose" (1882) to a host of decadent, symbolist, realist, and futurist miniatures, including Fedor Sologub's "Little Fairy Tales," Aleksei Remizov's dreams, Vasilii Kandinsky's prose poems, and Daniil Kharms' absurdist mini-stories.
